John Feder is a police Sergeant in West Orange New Jersey, with a 22-year record of sterling service. Unfortunately, that record of service to the community is in danger of being flushed down the toilet.

Sgt Feder, you see, performs—free—as a stand-up comedian. And his politically incorrect act may now cost him his job.

I heard about this yesterday on Opie and Anthony. Kenny is a friend of the show and until yesterday I had no idea that he was a cop. After this story hit the paper and Kenny's pension was put in jeopardy they let all of their listeners in on the rest of the information about what was going on. In any case this is going to be a very interesting case to see just where the line of free speech can be drawn when you are an officer of the law and are expected to be held to a higher standard. They are saying that since he wasn't getting paid for the stand up comedy that it cannot be considered moonlighting and the real problem comes from the higher standard he agreed to when he became a cop.

Free speech in New Jersey

"A push to teach the Bible in public schools, a renewed take on displaying the Ten Commandments at courthouses and even a measure ensuring government employees and students can say "Merry Christmas" without repercussions have won support from members of both parties.

All three measures passed at least one chamber of the Legislature last week by overwhelming votes.

National civil rights groups, though, say they've successfully fought similar measures in other states and wouldn't hesitate to sue the state of Georgia as well, particularly over the Bible class and Ten Commandment efforts."

Georgia's Bible Bills gaining support - Bible to be taught in GA. Classrooms

For the past nine months, the 15-year-old has sat, meditating at the base of a peepal tree in Nepal's Bara District, without food, water, sleep or the need to use the toilet. If that was not remarkable enough, on January 19, he spontaneously combusted, burning off the clothes he has worn for nine months but leaving no scars. Lest there be doubters, his followers caught that combustion on video and plan to present the footage, seen by The Age, at a news conference in Kathmandu, soon.

Buddha Boy Sponteneously Combusts

The most recent Hajj occurred during the first half of January 2006.

There were a number of stampedes, called "tragedies" in the press, during the Hajj which killed several hundred pilgrims.

These were not unavoidable accidents, they were the results of poor planning by the Saudi government.

And while the deaths of these pilgrims was a mere blip on the traditional western media's radar, it was a huge story in the Muslim world. Even the most objective news stories were suddenly casting Saudi Arabia in a very bad light and they decided to do something about it.

The 350 pilgrims were killed on January 12 and soon after, Saudi newspapers (which are all controlled by the state) began running up to 4 articles per day condemning the Danish cartoons.

There rarely is a clearer case of "Death to the West" being used to divert attention away from local problems.

Daily Kos: Muslim Cartoon Controversy: What the Media Isn't Telling You

1) Profits are up, but the wages and the incomes of average Americans are down.
2) More and more people are deeper and deeper in debt.
3) Job creation has not kept up with population growth, and the employment rate has fallen sharply.
4) Poverty is on the rise.
5) Rising health care costs are eroding families' already declining income.

Short and to the point.

via the Economic Policy Institute.

What's wrong with the economy?

"Traffic analysis, at the NSA? I'm tempted to be sarcastic, but I won't be. As you might know, I started a company a few years ago with a former NSA guy -- somebody who was a cryptographer and Russian linguist on those submarines that snuck into Soviet harbors to tap their phone lines -- and we applied traffic analysis to Internet discussion groups to identify opinion leaders, conversation trends and so forth. We used a lot of techniques that were developed or applied to law enforcement. And we didn't use anything that violated anybody's security clearances... really!

"(My company) was acquired by a business intelligence company funded by the CIA venture capital outfit. Apparently the stuff I invented is now in the hands of a couple of intelligence agencies, including Homeland Security.

"I'll tell you what I think the most troubling thing about all this is. It's easy to see whatever pattern you're looking for. It's like curve fitting in the stock market -- looks beautiful historically and maybe even in the short run, but it's a disaster in the making. So we have these guys running the country who saw a non-existent pattern in Iraq that justified a war ... and now we're going to give them software that will make it easy to create the illusion of patterns of conspiracy.

"Your friend from the NSA was right, but it's worse than he suggests. It's not just that social network analysis casts a wide net. It's that without oversight by people who really grasp the mathematics and have some distance from the whole thing, they're going to see patterns where there aren't any.

"They have a history of that."

Cringely NSA Spying addendum

This page links the cartoon in case you are curious. Yeah, its inceditary, but give me a fucking break.

Hamas members, some armed with guns, stormed the EU office and demanded apologies from EU member states, or face serious consequences. "It will be a suitable reaction, and it won't be predictable," said Abu Hafss, a member of the Al Quds Brigade (an affiliate of the group Islamic Jihad).

A suitable reaction? What are they going to do, draw their own cartoon? "I'll draw this fucking cartoon, man! I'm serious! I'll draw it! You better back down right now or the pen is hitting the paper! I'm not fucking around here!"

The more these idiots prance around with machine guns and threaten to kill people over a cartoon, the more they reenforce the inceditary message the cartoon conveys. If they aren't a violent culture they should put down the AK-47s and act like they aren't a violent culture.

Tensions continue to rise in Middle East over Cartoons

Well, if you had any doubts left as to whether or not Bush had any respect at all for Freedom of Speech, this CNN article should clear that right up for ya'.

She wore a t-shirt with an anti-war slogan on it. They asked her to cover it up, she refused, they arrested her for "unlawful conduct".

I'd like to know exactly when fashion went from being a matter of personal taste, to carrying the force of law.

Sign of the times.

What is a protest-wearing a t-shirt stating the truth about how many are DEAD?

Cindy Sheehan arrested for... wearing a shirt!

Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

gee, so he wants us to get 15% of total oil used from somewhere else? Is this because the war which was supposed to pay for itself turned into an utter debacle? We'll remove Saddam, turn Iraq back up to full production and that'll solve the energy problems?

I deliberately avoided watching this because I like my television and wouldn't want it to be injured by showing this imbecile. Frankly, this speech is embarassing. Decrease Gulf oil? Not a problem, there are comments that places like Iran will be well in it's way to dry in 20 years.

Spend money on R&D into alternate energy? Why the hell isn't ExxonMobil doing this? I mean they were over 10 BILLION in the black last quarter. More to the point, his "ideas" for alternate energy (notably the ones on ethanol) are totally bogus. Under the current system it takes roughly a gallon of dead dinosaurs (read oil) to make a gallon of ethanol. He then goes on to talk about wood chips and grass. As any first year science student knows, that doesn't make ethanol, that makes methanol, and methanol and gas don't mix. I guess he missed that in college because he was consuming too much ethanol.

On other topics:
More science teachers and you want them to come from the private sector? Guess what, they're not in education because they're already making more money by not doing it. Who MIGHT you get with this pile of crap? I'm sure the Discovery Institute has a list of people with science degrees who would love to get into a classroom.

Health savings accounts? This helps the Medicare/Medicaid problem how? The people who can afford these aren't the ones who don't have health insurance now and aren't the ones drawing on Medicare/Medicaid. This is not just a straw man, it is one of the worst ideas to come out of a White House just brimming with bad ideas. The poor can't afford these, but will now be blamed for not having them.

On the bright side, he only trotted out 9/11 twice...

WHy do people like him? I don't know. How can you talk about freedom and then arrest someone who doesn't agree with you for wearing a t-shirt? Dante needs to come back and write a book called FREEDOM LOST.

President Bush Delivers State of the Union Address

Open source learning.

I love this site - I just learned how to make a shipping box out of normally useless boxes. That will save me money every week.

There's all kinds of stuff on this site - some stuff is techy, some stuff is not....but you never know - you might learn how to solve a problem or make something fun....or just get inspiration for your own inventions!

Instructables.com - Make something, then teach others!